ike
alligators or boa-constrictors. The alligator, however, does not
come up the mountain streams; and the boa-constrictors are rare,
save on the east coast: but it is as well, ere you jump into a
pool, to look whether there be not a snake in it, of any length from
three to twenty feet.

Over the pool rose a rock, carrying a mass of vegetation, to be
seen, doubtless, in every such spot in the island, but of a richness
and variety beyond description. Nearest to the water the primeval
garden began with ferns and creeping Selaginella. Next, of course,
the common Arum, {218c} with snow-white spathe and spadix, mingled
with the larger leaves of Balisier, wild Tania, and Seguine, some of
the latter upborne on crooked fleshy stalks as thick as a man's leg,
and six feet high. Above them was a tangle of twenty different
bushes, with leaves of every shape; above them again, the arching
shoots of a bamboo clump, forty feet high, threw a deep shade over
pool and rock and herbage; while above it again enormous timber
trees were packed, one behind the other, up the steep mountain-side.
On the more level ground were the usual weeds; Ipomoeas with white
and purple flowers, Bignonias, Echites, and Allamandas, with yellow
ones, scrambled and tumbled everywhere; and, if not just there, then
often enough elsewhere, might be seen a single Aristolochia
scrambling up a low tree, from which hung, amid round leaves, huge
flowers shaped like a great helmet with a ladle at the lower lip, a
foot or more across, of purplish colour, spotted like a toad, and
about as fragrant as a dead dog.

But the plants which would strike a botanist most, I think, the
first time he found himself on a tropic burn-side, are the peppers,
groves of tall herbs some ten feet high or more, utterly unlike any
European plants I have ever seen. Some {219a} have round leaves,
peltate, that is, with the footstalk springing from inside the
circumference, like a one-sided umbrella. They catch the eye at
once, from the great size of their leaves, each a full foot across;
but they are hardly as odd and foreign-looking as the more abundant
forms of peppers, {219b} usually so soft and green that they look as
if you might make them into salad, stalks and all, yet with a quaint
stiffness and primness, given by the regular jointing of their
knotted stalks, and the regular tiling of their pointed, drooping,
strong-nerved leaves, which are